The performance of a communication link can be monitored by measuring the latencies of components of the communication link. In addition, measured latencies can be used to improve the performance of the communication link.
Phase compensation buffers contribute to the latency of a communications link. In one example, a receiver for a communication link has a phase compensation buffer that compensates for the unknown and potentially changing phase relationship between transmit and receive clocks for the communication link.
For a phase compensation buffer with write and read pointers, the latency of the phase compensation buffer can be determined from the write and read pointers. However, the latency cannot be determined to a fraction of a cycle of the transmit or receive clocks because the write and read pointers change too quickly.
The present invention may address one or more of the above issues.